Gold Paper Mental Health Group | Documentation from a Journey into Organising
The Gold Paper Mental Health Working Group is an independent student-staff inquiry group. The group met weekly on campus at Goldsmiths’ Student Union building in New Cross, South East London, between February 2018 and June 2019. The group understands mental health to be a common good (see Mental Health as Public Good, The Gold Paper, 2018, pp 34-37), rejecting its privatisation and pathologization via dominant understandings of mental health that isolate individuals through institutionalisation, blaming them for their own conditions and removing community care and assistance from those in need.
The following text describes the journey that the group undertook in order to make their demands visible within the institution, and to openly tackle the causes and effects of an increasing institutional pressure on students and members of staff. The text was instigated by a series of questions posed by Arts Catalyst to The Gold Paper Mental Health Working Group around: the relationship between academia and the health of those who inhabit its four walls (and beyond); the ways agency can be performed by students, researchers and staff in the context of neoliberal pressures and constraints; the role of art in the struggles and tactics initiated by the group.
You can follow the Gold Paper Mental Health Group’s blog here.
Key moments in the struggle and justice initiatives on mental health on campus at Goldsmiths:
2014/15
Beginning of the renaming and restructuring of the Disability Office into Wellbeing Services.
March 2015
Occupation of Deptford Town Hall. Gained notoriety for the prominence of demands around mental health provisions, with coverage in the Guardian focusing on the demand for “more counsellors”. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/may/11/student-mental-health-counselling-cut
December 2015
A People’s Tribunal: What’s Happened to Our University. Had a number of presentations and working groups, five years following the student protests in 2010, looking at the impact of marketisation on students and staff. One working group focused on mental health, and Mark Fisher contributed a recording. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j6j6StGBwQ / https://youtu.be/9eGFd7w69No
2016
The Gold Paper. The first iteration of the Gold Paper, written as a response to the Government Green Paper on Education. https://goldsmithsucu.wordpress.com/the-gold-paper/
February 2016
Fresh New Anxieties. A student-led discussion group. https://freshnewanxieties.tumblr.com/
December 2016
The centre for cultural studies (CCS) threatened with closure, to cover up sexual harassment case. (https://wewanttruthgoldsmiths.wordpress.com/) They produce an excellent text called Stop Opacity!
January 2017
Mark Fisher dies. https://fisherfunction.persona.co/WEEK-TWO
2017
The Gold Paper petition. Released with urgency and now including a demand on mental health following the suicide of Mark Fisher. https://goldsmithsucu.org/2017/03/20/gold-paper-petition/
2018
A report led by a cross-departmental group of student representatives at Goldsmiths found that 38% of students reported that their mental health had deteriorated since joining the university.
February 2018
UCU Strikes and Gold Paper meetings at The Field. Creation of three working groups: Housing, Governance and Mental Health during the UCU strikes. Origins of the Gold Paper Mental Health Group.
September 2018
The Gold Paper is updated with demands and action items from the working groups:
“The Gold Paper is produced collectively by a group of staff and students at Goldsmiths in response to the privatization and commodification of higher education in the UK. It seeks to articulate an alternative vision of what our university could and should be. (...) The Gold Paper is a grass-roots endeavour and campaigning document that reflects and informs ongoing efforts to effect change. It is an open invitation to every reader to participate in the process of imagining, debating, and building a university in which we would be proud to work and study.”
Access to full text: http://goldsmithsucu.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Gold-Paper-Web.pdf
March 2019
Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action Occupation of Deptford Town Hall. There are several demands around mental health, specific to the provision of mental health services for BAME students. https://tinyurl.com/GARAManifesto
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There have been ongoing student suicides, withdrawals and those who have “slipped through the net”. We remember each of them, and we will not be silent.In 2017, Goldsmiths believed that the institution did better than other universities when talking about student suicides. We are disgusted that they see student deaths as another competitive strategy when it is something that should never be used comparatively. One is too many. We must be a better full stop. Not relatively better. Mental health is for the common good. Not an institutional table where student health is gambled.
In accordance with The Gold Paper’s Mental Health realisations, we demand:
- Full acknowledgement of a mental health crisis on campus that is reflective of, and responsive to, a wider societal problem without negating institutional responsibilities.
- Mental health provision that is truly intersectional and that accounts for the adversities faced by a diverse student body, paying attention to mental health as embedded at a complex intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality and ability. Staffing must reflect this.
- An honest, holistic and preventative approach to mental health on campus, not superficial top-down solutions following a predetermined managerial rationale. This must include a change in the quality as well as the quantity of mental health-related services.
- Full-time doctor and an integrated medical centre on campus that can provide prescriptions, medical evidencing and front line care.
- An end to the outsourcing of staff within the Wellbeing Department and to referrals of care to external paid services.
- Recognition and sincere discussion of the structural causes of mental distress on campus, building on the actual experiences of students and staff.
- An adaptable and student-centred approach to expectations imposed on students and an end to bureaucratic deadlines, obligatory full-time study and ableist regimes of mitigation (Extenuating Circumstances, RASAs, etc.).
- Commitment to care plans that facilitate appropriate wellbeing support outside of term-time.
- Unconditional funding from the university for the Mental Health Working Group, who have been actively addressing mental health for the common good at Goldsmiths.
Inequalities and injustices on campus take place in the intersection of multiple oppressions: racism, class, ableism, gender, etc.:
- student fees/debt, with even higher fees for international students.
- outsourcing of cleaning and security staff, with a high percentage of them being people of colour. Fought through Goldsmiths Justice for Workers and Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action campaigns against staff casualization, with cleaners and security in-house in 2019 and 2020 respectively.
- precarisation of academic staff through pay and pensions devaluation, gender and ethnic pay gaps, rising workloads, precarious contracts. Fought back during UCU strikes in 2018 and 2020.
- further job insecurity due to restructuring initiatives such as Evolving Goldsmiths in early 2020 and the refusal to protect associate lecturers and fixed-term staff positions during the Covid-19 pandemic, with workload allocated to those remaining. Contested through UCU’s Alternative Goldsmiths and Justice for Workers campaigns. https://goldsmithsucu.org/2020/04/23/full-statement-by-goldsmiths-ucu-on-the-closure-of-evolving-goldsmiths/
- fast-speed degrees, with international students forced to undertake their degrees full-times as per visa conditions which limit their stay in the UK and their access to work, as well as because of high living-cost, which not even scholarships are willing to cover. With the situation worsening under the Covid-19 pandemic crisis: https://www.goldsmithssu.org/news/article/6013/A-letter-from-the-international-student-body/
- excessive workload and performance pressure (e.g. REF in the case of academic staff) that compromise balancing academic careers and other caring responsibilities.
Methods and tactics: learning from Institutional Analysis
The increasing speed and pressure towards measurable outcomes proper to the Neoliberal university spurred a practice of meeting that was determinately slow; treading a line between open support-group and activist practice. Both staff and students took part, on equal footing, carving out time from schedules already overpopulated with demands. We actively struggled to resist the structures in which we found ourselves caught; to not replicate them in this holding space so that it might resonate outwards. This process is inseparable from the discourse and processes of Institutional Analysis.
The activity of the militant group is not aiming to provide ready-made rational answers to the questions they think people should be asking, but on the contrary, to deepen the level of their questioning, and to make clear the uniqueness of each phase of the historical process.
Felix Guattari, Students, the Mad and “Deliquents”, 1968
February2018 - June 2019
Two hour-long weekly meetings during the academic year with allocated productive and non-productive time
Summer Term 2018
Anne Querrien event/workshop with support from Goldsmiths Students Union (SSU)
18th January 2019
Statement read in the introduction to the 2nd Mark Fisher Annual Memorial Lecture
Autumn Term 2019
We developed a practice of testimony creation and gathering that does not consider experiences with mental health as self-enclosed but sees them as embedded and in part produced by institutional structures and procedures. We find one another in each other’s words.
Spring Term 2019
Collective writing of our demands: https://goldpapermentalhealth.wordpress.com/our-demands/
Creation of a blog to share information about the group, our demands and other resources.
Collective reading sessions of The Socialist Patients Collective (SPK): Turn Illness Into A Weapon.
Summer Term 2019
Questioning Goldsmiths’ Be Well Do Well campaign through the Be Well Do Well? zine-making workshop series and a publication of all collated contributions in the Be Well, Do Well? Zine: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11D_UVnI3q4JikXQRVmZWjaGGk8ORzuw2/view
16th June 2019
Presenting our practice to other mental health activist collectives during Other Ways to Care second annual assembly at Art Catalyst, in the context of the Antiuniversity Festival.
The encounter with artistic practices: enacting agency to transform the institution
The Gold Paper mental health working group met with artistic practice in its most expanded notion. One that you would recognise in the work of Tania Bruguera or the Workers Reports from the Jubilee Arts Festival (1979). It borrows on artistic and cultural strategies but also on therapeutic, activist, community and academic practices. It is a practice that pays less and less attention to the borders between discourses, focusing instead on the lived experiences and conditions that frame them.
We draw on Anne Querrien idea of the double power, as per her article on the therapeutic club With the Club, a Double Power is Established at the Hospital (2020). Differently from a top-down managerial approach, the Gold Paper Mental Health Group sustains an inquiry on issues of mental health on campus through conversational and making practices which do not insist in making people function within a dysfunctional institution. Rather, the group is invested in a collective practice of institutional analysis aimed at recognizing neoliberal practices and logics and how they affect/make ill the university and those who inhabit/make it. In holding a student-staff space for meeting, speaking, listening, sharing and making, we aim to challenge the institutionalization of the neoliberal university, attempting instead to institute another university and another academic culture from within.
We have been quiet during the 2019/20 academic year, but plan to be back in action from September 2020 onwards through:
- new and stronger solidarities with other struggles on campus, closer to initiatives exploring various intersectionalities, e.g. mental health and racism by GARA and Invisible Voices; mental health and ableism by the Ableism Discussion Group and Visual Cultures Society; mental health, gender and care by Centre for Feminist Research.
- widening participation to people across departments (beyond Visual Cultures and Arts)
- reaching more academic and non-academic staff
- expanding resources available via our blog to readings, podcasts, films, etc.
- connecting with groups in other colleges and universities addressing mental health in the context of the UK’s higher education